Checking It Twice: Can AI Help with Holiday Shopping?

Coming up with ideas for everyone on your holiday gift list is a challenge. Can AI help?

Even if you had a team of reindeer and a workshop full of magical helpers, finishing all your seasonal shopping for family and friends would still be hard. To take some of the guesswork out of gift-giving, I have used online gift registries and gift exchange apps, and I like using my Library card to look at product reviews on Consumer Reports.

Having heard that people are using AI models like ChatGPT to plan weekly meals and even vacations, I wanted to see if this could be a new resource that could assist me. I tried out the free versions of several different AI models (ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini) to see if I could get some helpful gift recommendations.

I first used the AIs to generate gift ideas for my parents.

• ChatGPT generated some general advice and a long list of different categories like personalized gifts, experience gifts, health and wellness, and tech gadgets.
• Gemini gave a long list of items, including cozy blankets, personalized photo albums, gourmet food baskets, and wireless phone chargers. Gemini also included a sappy reminder that “the best gift comes from the heart.”
• Copilot gave me a short, digestible list with a handful of items, including a digital picture frame, cozy slippers, and smartphone devices. This response also had links to referenced gift guide articles, which I appreciated.

I found these recommendations to be a little generic, but since I did not give the models any information about the kinds of things my parents like, I feel like the recommendations were decent.

I then asked what I should get for my younger brother. This time, I provided more detail, entering information about my brother’s favorite sports teams, restaurants, and hobbies into my prompt. For each of these interests, I received a separate list of ideas, including sports jerseys, restaurant gift cards, and disc golf accessories. Since it is uncertain what the AI models will use for future training, I refrained from including very much personal information.

While none of the recommendations were particularly novel or unique, if I had no idea what to get for someone, I could use this method to at least get started. However, I am confident a simple search on Google, DuckDuckGo, or another search engine would yield similar gift ideas.

My experiment was a good reminder that AI models are trained on massive amounts of information and that they essentially act like a very complex autocomplete, filling in the most likely response to a given prompt. That may explain why the answers I received were very basic.

For this holiday season, I will stick to coming up with my own ideas. If it’s the thought that counts, what does it mean if I have an AI do the thinking for me?

Brad Smith
Digital Innovation Department